Information technology is in the throes of a dramatic transformation. Virtualization is giving way to cloud computing; the ubiquity of powerful handheld devices is creating new paradigms in mobility and social interaction; the massive profusion of information generation is leading to powerful new opportunities for Big Data analytics. Cloud computing has been called “a disruptive force” with the potential for long-term impact on most industries.
Additionally, nowhere is this need for next-generation performance and capacity more critical than in enterprise storage solutions. Organizations are creating more data than ever before and data generation is growing at a staggering rate.
It's not just storage capacity that's a challenge to computing's new paradigm: Speed and performance are equally crucial. Organizations must be able to access their most important data as quickly as possible to act upon it effectively. They need solutions that minimize latency, maximize input/output operations per second (IOPS) and deliver maximum capacity and performance in a cost-efficient manner. Otherwise, the cost of delivering sufficient storage capacity and performance will cripple this new computing paradigm before it ever gets its sea legs.
The storage industry has made great strides in adapting technology to deliver more capacity and better performance without congruent increases in costs. Solutions such as compression, deduplication, and intelligent tiering have made today's disk storage systems far more efficient and have enabled the widespread proliferation of virtualization that has set the stage for the transition to cloud computing.
But those solutions go just so far: Spinning disk storage has practical limitations in speed and performance. The real promise for next-generation performance has always been in solid-state technology. Solid-state technology employs non-volatile flash memory so there are no moving parts, meaning solid-state solutions operate much faster than traditional disk drives in reading and writing data. A single enterprise-grade solid-state solution can handle a transaction workload of 100 traditional hard drives—with more reliability and less power consumption in a much smaller physical space.
Most of the leading enterprise storage vendors incorporate solid-state technology as part of their overall solutions, but in limited capacities usually targeted for specific, storage-intensive production applications that require very high levels of performance: Video editing, computer-aided design and high-end online transaction processing systems (OLTPs) are some of the obvious choices.
The challenge in deploying solid-state technology more ubiquitously across the enterprise—for all enterprise applications—has been one of cost. Although NAND Flash solutions could deliver 100 times the performance of traditional spinning disks—at one-tenth the power consumption—they have also been about 10 times more expensive to deploy.
Simply, the cost of deploying robust enterprise-grade solid-state technology has been too high for widespread deployment across all enterprise applications. However, that excuse will not suffice for the future, as the performance level ensured by solid-state technology becomes even more critical for all applications across all types of businesses.
The reality is that the capacity and performance of solid-state technology will be a necessary part of next-generation data center infrastructures if these infrastructures are to deliver on the promise of cloud computing, Big Data and all of the other critical aspects of computing's next era. Enterprise-grade solid-state technology will be crucial to the underlying storage infrastructure—driving all enterprise applications—to meet ever-changing requirements for performance, speed, capacity, and agility.
Next-generation solid-state technology for the enterprise must be robust, reliable, fully featured, and cost-efficient: It must go beyond what is available in solid-state today, particularly when IT decision-makers think about typical solid-state drives (SSDs) that use HDD protocols to speak to the rest of the world. This deployment of solid-state technology has been useful in their initial applications, such as in laptop computing, but is nowhere near the right design for true enterprise-grade solid-state storage. The challenge to the storage industry has been to figure out how to deliver enterprise-grade performance and reliability in solid-state technology at a reasonable cost for widespread enterprise appeal.
Accordingly, what is desired is to solve problems relating to data reduction and compression in solid-state storage, some of which may be discussed herein. Additionally, what is desired is to reduce drawbacks relating to data reduction and compression in solid-state storage, some of which may be discussed herein.